Hollow Holiness

"I can't think of a time that I ever believed in God or thought it was a miracle of God that I preached," says the voice-over in a new documentary film called Marjoe. "I just knew I could do it well." More's the pity. The narrator, Marjoe Gortner, has been a foot-hopping, finger-jabbing, Jesus-peddling evangelist for more than half of his 28 years, starting at the tough age of 3 1/2. At four, the curly-coiffed, dandied-up moppet stirred up headlines and a legal ruckus by marrying a young sailor and his girl in a California wedding.* Now he is a sensation in a devastating and disturbing film that casually tears away the "facade of holiness" that has been Marjoe's evangelical life.

From the beginning, as the film tells it, Marjoe was a child of corruption, born in a collection basket. When he was four, his evangelist parents took him to a Los Angeles rescue mission and had him ordained as a minister of the Old Time Faith Church. Then the family hit the hallelujah trail around the independent Pentecostal churches of the South and the Midwest. When Marjoe preached, according to the film, his parents cued him with prayerful exclamations ("Praise God!" meant the audience was ready for a collection); at home he was taught his routines under duress. To make him learn his lines, he claims, his mother sometimes smothered him with a pillow or stuck his head under water. Early film clips in the movie show horrific visions of the Pavlovian result: a red-headed marionette masquerading as a prodigy of God. Even as recently as last year, his father proudly referred to Marjoe as a "preaching machine."

The machine broke down for a while in adolescence. Marjoe's father left home, and from that point on, the story becomes Rashomonesque. Marjoe says that he left home too, at 14, and picked up with an older woman who acted both as a surrogate mother and lover; Marjoe's father Vernon claims that Marjoe was still living with his real mother. Then Marjoe married, fathered a daughter, now eleven, and drifted through a series of fit-and-start careers. The movie does not mention the marriage, which ended in divorce in 1968. There is a California warrant still open for Marjoe's arrest on a complaint of failing to pay child support.

By the late 1960s, Marjoe was back playing the old machine, telling fabricated stories about his call from God (in a dream, at four) and his baptism of the Spirit (in the bathtub, at five). Howard Smith, a columnist for Manhattan's Village Voice, heard about Marjoe at a party last year, taped an interview with him, and recognized him as a find. Smith then talked Theater Mogul Donald S. Rugoff and California Entrepreneur Max Palevsky (until recently a big McGovern bankroller) into backing a documentary through Cinema 10.

The result is probably the most concentrated attack on this brand of religious Americana that has ever been filmed. Robert Mitchum may have been sinister as the "love-hate" preacher in The Night of the Hunter, but he was at least demented. Burt Lancaster may have been a tainted exploiter in Elmer Gantry, but that was at least fiction. Marjoe is very real and very chilling, an unholy innocent who seems to see himself as nothing more than a Peck's Bad Boy, a flimflam man of God who gives good service in return for his dollar. Marjoe believes--and the movie demonstrates--that he did give something to many of the trusting blacks and whites who emptied their pockets for his prayer cloths: rapture here, deep joy there, and many a psychosomatic cure. Marjoe's own joy shows up as he gleefully counts an evening's take, or smugly apes himself, lolling on a water bed and proclaiming "Glory jee to Beezus."

The documentary purports to be a public act of confession and reform, since Marjoe has now put the God pitch behind him to become, he hopes, an out-and-out show business star. That would be more honest, to be sure. But the road to repentance seems hardly well served by a film that is itself a ripoff. Smith and Sarah Kernochan, the girl friend who co-produced and directed the film with him, used Marjoe's audiences as surely as he did: the tent meetings are real enough, but they were set up with Marjoe's connivance--just as a director of war movies, say, might set up a real battle for effect.

It is not just Marjoe's Pentecostalist crowds who are exploited, demeaned and manipulated. In Manhattan, where Marjoe is playing to sizable crowds, the reactions are different from those in the gospel big-tops but just as predictable: a lot of laughter, a good deal of patronizing liberal headshaking, a general tsk-tsking over the sorry state of religion. "Look," Marjoe seems to tell the world, "religious people are just as bad as we are." So are some film makers.

* California law at that point failed to establish any legal minimum age for ministers conducting weddings. After the marriage by Marjoe, the legislature set a minimum age of 21.

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